Sven Mattys
Professor
Profile
Biography
- State University of New York at Stony Brook, PhD in Psychology, 1997
- Université Libre de Bruxelles, BA in Psychology, 1993
Career
After graduating from the Université Libre de Bruxelles in 1993, I moved to the USA to carry out my PhD studies at the State University of New York at Stony Brook (1997). I remained in America as a postdoctoral researcher at the Johns Hopkins University (1997-1999) and then at the House Ear Institute in Los Angeles (1999-2000), before moving to the University of Bristol in 2001. I joined the University of York in 2012.
Departmental roles
- Research committee member
Research
Overview
My background is in experimental psycholinguistics. I am particularly interested in the perceptual, cognitive, and physiological mechanisms underlying speech recognition. Although the populations I have investigated so far (normal-hearing adults, hearing-impaired adults, and infants) vary widely in their quantitative and qualitative exposure to the spoken language, a number of research questions apply to all of them: How are novel spoken words learned? What is the time-course of speech processing? How is speech segmentation carried out? How are words represented in the lexicon? How do we recognise speech in adverse conditions?
Grants
- ESRC: "Split listening: A cognitive investigation of speech perception in adverse conditions", with co-PIs Sarah Knight and Ronan McGarrigle, 2023-2025
- The Leverhulme Trust: "Cognitive listening: Speech perception in noise within a cognitive framework", 2019-2023
Supervision
- Emily Rice (PhD)
- Alex Mepham (PhD)
Teaching
Undergraduate
- Hearing (Year 1)
- Language development (Year 1)
- Language development practical (Year 1)
Postgraduate
- Empirical project
External activities
Memberships
- Psychonomics Society
- Experimental Psychology Society
Editorial duties
- Action editor: Journal of Acoustical Society of America
- Consulting editor: Journal of Memory and Language, Journal of Experimental Psychology: LMC, Attention, Perception & Psychophysics, Applied Psycholinguistics.
- Grant assessment panel member: ESRC, UKRI, European Science Foundation, Flanders Research Foundation
